Is AI Content Bad for SEO?
Google doesn’t target machine-generated content so much as contents that are produced in bulk to win search rankings irrespective of who or what produced them. That’s what makes the biggest difference in your risk factor.
AI Content and SEO: The Basics
Since early 2023, Search Central has published the same position. Automation, including AI, is not against Google’s guidelines, so long as the automation produces helpful results for users. The March 2024 spam policy update went a step further to define scaled content abuse as the production of many pages for the sole purpose of manipulating rankings, whether the pages were created by automation, people, or both.
There is no switch labeled AI in ranking systems, and Search has not made a public announcement that it runs a detector across the web and demotes whatever it flags as such. Authorship of arbitrary text is something for which a search engine cannot provide a proof. What does get demoted is the pattern of rapid generation of text of low quality.
Practicality lies in volume and originality rather than tooling. Post four times a month and rewrite those posts for yourself after the first round of publishing. The lines we’ve set up will have no way to bite you. Publish four hundred pages and the method of production will not matter at all.
- Hundreds of pages published in weeks, none of them adding a new fact.
- Repetitive, AI-generated summaries of the top ten most relevant search results.
- Location or product variants where only the name of the location has been modified.
- Pages built around a keyword rather than around something you actually know.
- Third-party content parked on a strong domain to borrow its authority.
Why AI Content and SEO Matters
A humanizer is not the solution to the issues, and most buyers incorrectly assume that it is. Administering rewrites on autogenerated text changes the surface that a classifier sees. This process does not provide a fact, number, source, or opinion to the page. Therefore, whatever made the page redundant is preserved after the rewrite.
Recovery is another undervalued cost of penalties. Manual actions come with a notice in Search Console, and a reconsideration path, but algorithmic demotions come with neither. Google even states in their own documentation that a site may have to wait for a future update to even be re-evaluated. So when someone gives you a date for recovery, they are really giving you their best guess.
There is a convergence problem at the root of everything. Three competitors asking the same questions about the same topic receive the same basic model, the same examples, and sometimes even the same subheadings. While each of those examples is fine on its own, everything starts looking the same when multiple tabs are open. Similarity isn’t a penalty. It is a reason why no one will link to you.
The unflattering part
Human authorship is not a ranking signal. A person writing filler goes up against a model writing filler and loses on cost. What helps is a writer writing something in the page a model is not able to obtain.
How Articled Approaches AI Content and SEO
Each brief is given to one researcher who forms a draft citation for each source used, and returns to you with follow-up questions for gaps in the brief. We have a three day delivery window for this reason. No one on this team can do thorough research for an unfamiliar subject and return it to us by the end of the afternoon.
Our rate is a quoted $10 per 100 words (1% fee is on top of the quoted rate). A 1,000 word article is $100 of quoted writing plus a $1 fee (our fee), for a total of $101, and 100% of the writing is passed on to the writer. Half of our fee, 0.5%, is donated to tree planting.
There are two things we will not sell you. We do not do technical SEO, so if crawling, templates or redirect chains are the real issues, better copy won’t solve the problem. We also do not offer services to customers who request thirty hundred city pages that differ by only one word, because that request pretty much describes the issue as our policy states.
- One named writer per brief, with follow-up questions answered.
- Citations are included in the draft for verifiability.
- Delivery email contains reports from a dozen detection and plagiarism platforms.
- Two rounds of revisions, valid for fourteen days after delivery.
- Transfers all rights after delivery, no attribution needed.
AI Content and SEO FAQs
A human writer handles every part of this. Ask us on the contact page and a person will answer the same working day.
A human writer handles every part of this. Ask us on the contact page and a person will answer the same working day.
Not for that alone. Google’s stance appears to accept automation of outputs that have utility and are meant for the user. The issue arises when such outputs are employed to produce multiple pages that are meant to primarily serve to achieve a position in the rankings, which by and large is a decision based on volume rather than the tools employed.
Google has never claimed it runs an authorship classifier as a ranking factor, and no classifier is reliable enough to bear such a responsibility. Its position is to arrive at a judgment based on the content of a page. Treat detection scores as things that may be read by your team, not by Search.
Before rewriting, take inventory. Classify every URL as whether or not it contains something a competitor cannot publish. Consolidate or remove those that do not contain anything and rewrite those that do. We can write the replacements for those, but we cannot control how quickly the search engines will rank the pages.
It is beneficial for style and helps eliminate some errors. However, it is unlikely to fill any voids. Editing does not add the customer interview, the pricing test, or the failed experiment that would contribute value and make the page more informative and worth reading.
No, and we would rather say so. Twelve files that you delivered with your request are available for and can assist a client, an editor, or a compliance reviewer with how the content was transcribed. Google will not see them and they carry no ranking whatsoever.
If you have published generated pages, your best first step is an inventory instead of a rewrite. Organize them according to whether a page contains something that only you could have authored. The rewrite budget will primarily go to those pages, and the others will be condensed or removed with no notice.
Content a person actually wrote
$10 per 100 words, and the writer keeps all of it. Our 1% sits on top, 0.5% goes to trees, and no generated text appears anywhere in the process.